The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

One-Stop Thinking Makes People Misunderstand Child Development

We tend to be attracted by the idea of “one-stop
shopping”, but we can pay the price of convenience by not getting exactly what
we want. In fact, we may find ourselves regretting purchases we made just in
order to save time. “One-stop thinking” presents the same problem: when we pay
attention only to one factor that affects children’s development, we cut down
on the time spent in consideration, but we risk making some big mistakes.

In reality, children’s physical and mental development
are invariably affected by more than one factor, genetic or environmental. And
usually, the influential factors are not just two or three, but many. Often,
influences act bidirectionally, so that children affect their parents as much
as parents affect their children. Influences can even be transactional in
nature, so that bidirectional effects (for example, parents’ and children’s
mutual influences, or families’ and schools’) change in their nature over time and experience. Developmental
outcomes may depend on some combination of environmental circumstances (helpful
or harmful) and the characteristics of the child (vulnerable or resilient),
with the best outcomes resulting for a resilient child in a helpful environment
and the worst for a vulnerable child in a harmful environment.

In other words, it’s not rocket science-- it’s a lot more complicated than that (even
though this statement is annoying to rocket scientists).

Recent years have seen a number of examples of
one-stop thinking about child development, not by developmental scientists
themselves, but by people popularizing and translating developmental research
and theory. Unfortunately, oversimplified translations are often applied to
pragmatic topics like how to intervene in children’s mental, behavioral, or
educational problems. These may be welcomed by consumers of services, because
their simplicity “makes sense”, especially if it echoes claims made familiar by
repetition. Those familiar and simple claims amount to what the developmental
scientist Jerome Kagan famously called “seductive ideas”—ideas that are so
appealing to us that we buy into them without much investigation of their
“one-stop” convenience.

Here are some familiar ideas that can lead to one-stop
thinking if we do not pay careful attention.

Infant
determinism is the idea that everything of
developmental importance is accomplished during the first years of life. Early
intervention follows on this idea by assuming that there is a desperate need to
change completely the circumstances of every child who is abused or neglected
in early life, most often by offering services to parents, but sometimes by foster
or adoptive placement. One-stop thinking on this topic ignores two facts: that
small changes in a family’s situation can help improve a child’s developmental
trajectory, and that events such as school availability and neighborhood safety
may later help restore derailed development. A 2014 article in the British
Journal of Social Work (Featherstone, B., Morris, K., & White, S., “A
marriage made in hell: Early intervention meets child protection.” BJSW, Vol.
44 (7), 1735-1749; oro.open.ac.uk/37437/3/329984C2.pdf) pointed to the mistakes
made when child welfare workers do not try offering needed support to families
rather than hurrying to intervene; this article is of particular interest in
that it places this issue in a political context.

Attachment
is an important concept in the study of child development as well as in
practical decisions about child care and custody. But one-stop thinking about
attachment and attachment disorders focuses entirely on these topics as the
unique core of personality and behavioral development. As a result, educators
and counselors may attend only to a child’s attachment issues and ignore all
other child and family characteristics that may be affecting development. In
addition, therapies directed at changing attachment may be proposed for an
enormous range of mental health problems, from autism to oppositional defiant
disorder. Interestingly, the fad of the last 30 or 40 years for an exclusive
focus on attachment appears to be waning, and another fad is emerging.

Trauma,
in
the mental health context, describes experiences of seriously frightening or
painful events that interfere with important relationships and thus with
development. Trauma-informed approaches are essential for work with children
and parents, as reactions to trauma may involve behaviors like fearfulness and aggressiveness,
sleep disorders and bedwetting, for which children are brought into treatment.Attempting
to treat these without considering the influence of trauma is likely to be
ineffective, if trauma is indeed involved. But one-stop thinking about trauma
leads to the assumption that where there is a mood or behavior problem, there
must be trauma in the background, even though there is no independent evidence
that this has occurred. There is only a step from this assumption to the whole “recovered
memory” charlatanry that was thriving 20 years ago and is still in existence.
Seeing trauma everywhere is the new fad that has replaced the attachment fad;
even the organization ATTACh, at one time the Association for Treatment and
Training of Attachment in Children and a great proponent of attachment therapies,
has now caught the trauma wave and become the Association for Training on
Trauma & Attachment in Children.

Neuroscience
is both a critical aspect of research on child development and an insidious
temptation to one-stop thinking. I recently attended a presentation on the
effects of poverty on children that used multiple PowerPoint slides of children’s
brains to buttress the strong existing evidence that children growing up in
poverty have worse physical and mental health, and worse academic achievement,
than those growing up in better circumstances. No one (including me—I didn’t want
to offend the speaker who kindly gave his time) demanded to know what on earth
the brain images had to do with the argument that poverty is not good for
children’s development. Using the slides was only a way to strengthen, not the
argument itself, but the reception of the basic argument by an impressed
audience. One of the problems with one-stop thinking about neuroscience is that
the field itself, and what we know about it today, is too complex and too
incomplete to allow us to use this information well. For example, a recent
study described by Pam Belluck in the New York Times (Dec. 21, 2016, p. A15)
noted that in the course of pregnancy women lose (yes, lose) brain volume in
areas that are used in understanding how other people perceive things. Those
who lost most volume, in the reported study, were most emotionally attached to
their babies. Thus, loss of brain volume can improve certain capabilities, which
we already knew from information about hormone-determined brain changes in boy
and girl babies. But—according to the famous study of London taxi drivers,
increased capabilities can also go with increases in brain volume! One-stop
thinking is especially dangerous when the “stop” does not offer much clarity.

A real problem with one-stop thinking about children
is that we don’t just create our own mistakes. We also have other people who
would like us to make the mistakes they suggest, for the benefit of their own
financial or personal aggrandizement. And often they are very attractive and
persuasive people who appear to offer simple, achievable solutions to our
complicated, intractable problems, or those of our children. They tell us they
are world experts, or have cared for thousands of foster children, or even have
a direct connection to supernatural powers. When we meet these people, we need
to resist their one-factor solutions and remember the adage about rocket
science.

4 comments:

It seems that all one has to do to become an "international expert" in child behavior is to make a slick website, knock off a couple of books, have a few years in clinical practice, and get a company to arrange speaking engagements, with continuing education credits sweetening the deal. All it takes is some marketing savvy and an easy, appealing take-home message.

Take Nancy Thomas: She has no real credentials to be a "parenting expert," but she has a message that apparently appeals to many. She tells adoptive mothers that they should never be questioned about their parenting methods, and that they should be pampered by friends and relatives. Treated "like a queen." She tells her audience: "You're awesome to live with this puke." After an APSAC task force found serious problems with Nancy Thomas parenting, I asked one Colorado county DHS social worker why they continued to invite Nancy Thomas to talk to parents. She answered because she got high marks from past event attendees.

I am troubled that these fads in one-stop thinking about child development can be found in DHS-sponsored materials and classes for foster and adoptive parents.

I have attended some such classes provided by Colorado county DHSs and their partner organizations, such as Adoption Exchange. My experience is that these entities still rely on fringe beliefs about attachment and trauma, with some brain sciency stuff thrown in.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I have to say I found the attitude of speakers especially troubling. I have found they tend to dehumanize adoptive/foster children -- portraying them as comically stupid or cunning adversaries, or both, because of early trauma. The speakers made an "us vs. them" alliance with the audience. Most of the empathy for the caregivers. All jokes at the children's expense.

Yep, it seems to be all about charm and making your audience think they are admirable. The market for snake oil has never been better, especially since now all evidence and counterargument can be dismissed as "fake news".

Yes, I recall one particularly nasty Holding Therapist, who does a dangerous form of prone restraint, tried to dismiss critics by saying:

"You know, there’s a group out there. I don’t know where they come off. They’re really against what they call 'touch therapy.' … [S]ome people get way to the extreme. … Advocates for Children in Therapy … said no child should ever be touched, never be held, never be cradled, and all this touch therapy, touch point therapy, or whatever, is wrong. And you know I’m thinking, if you’ve got a kid who’s never had any human contact, you’d better do something to get them on the pathways soon. So those kind of approaches are appropriate … "

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.